Video provides best break for budget hearings

Here at CityBeat, we cover a lot of budget hearings, and they can very easily wear us down with their partisan squabbles and monotonous focus on details that everyone will forget about in a week or so.

Right now, we're watching the Ohio Senate budget hearings, which have so far involved Democrats repeatedly bringing up amendments only to get them shot down by the Republican majority. Very repetitive, very boring.

Thankfully, the Internet has given us the chance to take what we like to call "cat breaks." This video — arguably the greatest thing in the entire Internet — is the latest example:

With voter approval, Washington state embraces new freedoms

This morning, social conservatives around the world dug
themselves into Armageddon-resistant bunkers, preparing for what they
knew was coming. Today, marijuana and same-sex marriage were
being legalized in Washington state.

But the bunkers may have been a waste of time and money,
considering the end of the world didn’t occur. In fact, it seems like a lot
of people are happy with the legal changes, which voters approved on
Nov. 6.

From the perspective of this CityBeat writer, same-sex marriage would be great. It’s something I wrote about extensively before (“The Evolution of Equality,”
Nov. 28 issue). As a refresher, not only does same-sex marriage bring a
host of benefits to same-sex couples, but it also produces economic
benefits for everyone. A recent study from Bill
LaFayette, founder of Regionomics LLC, found that legalizing gay
marriage would grow Ohio’s gross domestic product, which measures
economic worth, by $100-$126 million within three years.

Marijuana has similar benefits. Not only does it give
people the freedom to put a relatively harmless plant into their bodies,
but it also provides a big boon to state budgets. For Washington, it’s
estimated the marijuana tax will bring in as much as $500 million a
year.

Legalization also creates jobs and economic growth as
businesses pop up to sell the product and customers buy the plant to
toke up. Washington State’s Office of Financial Management estimates the
marijuana market will be worth about $1 billion in the state.
Considering the state is about 2 percent of the U.S. population, that
could be extrapolated to indicate a potential $50 billion nationwide
market.

Still, public use of marijuana and driving while
intoxicated remain illegal. In a press conference Wednesday, Seattle
City Attorney Pete Holmes said, “If you're smoking in plain public view, you're
subject to a ticket. … Initiative 502 uses the alcohol model. If
drinking in public is disallowed, so is smoking marijuana in public.”

The Seattle Police Department (SPD) seems a bit
friendlier. In an email today, SPD told officers to only give verbal
warnings until further notice. The warnings should essentially tell
people to take their marijuana inside, or, as SPD spokesperson Jonah
Spangenthal-Lee put it on the SPD Blotter,
“The police department believes that, under state law, you may
responsibly get baked, order some pizzas and enjoy a ‘Lord of the Rings’
marathon in the privacy of your own home, if you want to.”

The Washington law also faces possible federal resistance.
Even though the state legalized pot, the drug is still illegal under
federal law. That means the feds can still shut down marijuana
businesses and arrest buyers, just like they have with legal medical marijuana
dispensaries in the past.

In fact, maybe the limitations are what’s keeping the
apocalypse at bay. Maybe social conservatives will get to make use of
those bunkers if the rest of the country catches on to Washington’s
example.

Senatorial candidate holds PolitiFact Ohio record for most statements rated "Pants on Fire"

Happy birthday to Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel! The
treasurer and GOP candidate for U.S. Senate turns 35 today, and the Ohio
Democratic Party celebrated the occasion by delivering a new pair of
pants to the treasurer’s office.

“If anyone needs a new pair of pants for his birthday it’s
Josh Mandel, who has earned more ‘Pants on Fire’ ratings from
Politifact Ohio than any politician in state history — hopefully he will
get some use out of these before his next lie about (Democratic U.S.
Sen.) Sherrod (Brown),” Ohio Democratic Party spokesman Andrew Zucker
wrote in a statement.

Mandel has earned six “Pants on Fire” ratings — the
signifier given to an outright lie by the fact-checking agency run by
The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer, PolitiFact Ohio. Mandel holds the most
“Pants on Fire” rulings of any politician reviewed by the group.

Mandel doesn’t have a monopoly on lies: In a Wednesday
fact check, PolitiFact Ohio ruled a Brown campaign advertisement that
claimed Ohio’s investment fund has not improved under Mandel was
“false.”

Zucker told CityBeat Mandel’s staff seemed
surprised by the gift (American Apparel trousers size 34) and promised
to deliver it, but said the treasurer wasn’t in the office.

The pants were folded and tied with ribbon. They contained
a note reading, “Josh — So many of your pants have caught fire from
Politifact’s ratings that we thought you could use a new pair. They’ll
look great for your next fundraising trip to the Bahamas! Happy
Birthday, The Ohio Democratic Party.”

Mandel’s press secretary has not responded to CityBeat’s call and email for comment as of this posting. This blog will be updated if we hear back.

Governor makes offensive remark when GOP trails among women voters

At a Romney-Ryan rally near Cincinnati yesterday, Gov.
John Kasich made some remarks women voters might find offensive. When
describing what his wife and the wives of Mitt Romney, Rep. Paul Ryan and Sen. Rob Portman are
doing as the men attend political rallies, Kasich told Romney supporters the women are “at
home doing the laundry.”

The full quote: “It’s not easy to be a spouse of an
elected official. You know, they’re at home doing the laundry and doing
so many things while we’re up here on the stage getting a little bit of
applause, right? They don’t often share in it.”

The comments were quickly picked up by liberal blog Plunderbund, which criticized Kasich's history with women.

While the comment may be true (CityBeat could not
confirm if Karen Kasich was doing laundry while Kasich was speaking), it
does little for a political party already struggling with women voters.
In the latest poll from Public Policy Polling, Romney was down 10
points to Obama among women voters in Ohio. This is often attributed to
what Democrats labeled a “war on women” by Republicans to diminish
contraceptive and abortion rights. CityBeat previously covered the local and national political issues regarding women here.

Kasich had problems with public speaking in the past. In his 2012 State of the State speech, which The Hill
labeled “bizarre,” Kasich repeatedly mentioned his “hot wife,” imitated
a Parkinson’s patient and referred to Californians as “wackadoodles.”
In a previous statement, Kasich said he would run over opponents with a
bus. “If you’re not on the bus, we will run over you with the bus,” he
told lobbyists. “And I’m not kidding.”

Jean Schmidt brings sexy back to the Ohio delegation; named 5th sexiest on the Hill by TMZ

U.S. Congressman from Illinois Aaron Schock has shredded
abs that he shows off on the cover of men’s magazines; Google was
inundated with queries for shirtless pictures of fitness fanatic and
presumed Republican vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan after the
announcement of his joining the Romney ticket; President Barack Obama is
known to frequently hit the basketball court and is a favorite among
female constituents.

So who brings home the sexy bacon back to Ohio? According to gossip blogreputable journal of record TMZ, it’s Miami Township Rep. Jean Schmidt.

Schmidt ranked No. 5 in the list 20-member list of
“Sexiest U.S. Politicians – The Right to Bare Buff Arms.” She beat out
such noted sexpots as Bill and Hillary Clinton, former California Gov.
Arnold Schwarzenegger and President Merkin Muffley.

We at CityBeat say “keep on it, squirrelfriend!” and can’t wait to see her on a “babes and hunks of Congress” calendar one day soon.

Here's a video of Schmidt looking pretty great when she misunderstood the Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act. (She thought it was struck down.)

I, for one, was comforted to hear the warm Southern drawl
put on by Ohio treasurer and senatorial candidate Josh Mandel while he
campaigned for Mitt Romney before Beallsville coal miners on Wednesday.

As someone who recently spent six months living and
working in Montgomery, Ala., it brought me back to simpler times when
summer nights were spent drinking sweet tea spiked with rum on a porch and
it was for some reason still OK to refer to a grown black man as “boy.”

So when I heard Josh Mandel extoll the virtues of coal in a
drawl reminiscent of fresh butter spread on cornbread, I immediately
thought, “shucks, this guy gets me — he’s one of us.”

Wait, what’s that? Mandel hails from Lyndhurst, a
Cleveland suburb that’s the Hyde Park of Northern Ohio? He’s never even
eaten cheese grits? (Editor’s note: CityBeat could not independently
verify that Josh Mandel has in fact never eaten cheese grits.) Well now I
just feel put on.

The Enquirer reported that Mandel had never publicly used a Southern accent before.

"As if blowing off work and hiring unqualified campaign
workers and friends at taxpayer expense wasn't evidence enough of his
blatant disregard for the people who elected him treasurer expecting
that he'd do his job, Josh Mandel has now stooped to faking his accent
as a means of earning votes," Ohio Democratic Party spokesman Andrew
Zucker said in a statement. "It's sad, it's pathetic and unfortunately
it's concrete proof that he is just another politician who can't be
trusted."

Sounding folksy or down-homey is nothing new in presidential politics.

When campaigning in Alabama, Romney famously dropped
“y’alls” into his speech and spoke of his newfound love for “cheesy
grits” and catfish (my editor in Montgomery was quick to point out to
me, another carpetbagger, that any real Southerner knows they’re cheese
grits, not cheesy grits).

“If you’re going to pander, at least pander well, and this
isn’t pandering well,” Stephen Gordon, a Republican consultant based in
Birmingham, Ala., told the Boston Herald shortly after Romney made his
remarks.

“People in the Deep South have a bit of a natural distrust
for Northerners, especially folks from the Northeast,” said Gordon, who
is not affiliated with any campaign in the Republican presidential
contest. “There are cultural differences, stemming all the way back to
the Civil War, and they affect the way people perceive Mr. Romney.”

Romney is by no means the first to affect an accent to fit in with the natives.

Both Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton adopted drawls while on campaign stops in the South. Though those
two former presidents, from Texas and Arkansas respectively, had the
bona fides to pull it off.

Flub at Louisville design hub caused thousands of papers to be trashed

Confirming rumors that swirled for two days through media circles, The Enquirer’s top editor has written a memo outlining how some editions of Sunday’s newspaper included a photograph with the word “fuck” in it.

Once editors learned about the photo, several thousand copies of the newspaper that hadn’t yet been distributed were trashed. The edition was reprinted without the offending photo.

Enquirer Editor Carolyn Washburn confirmed the gaffe in an email to staffers sent at 4:10 p.m Monday, which CityBeat received today.

“I learned about this after midnight Saturday when someone in our operation saw this photo and alerted us,” Washburn wrote. “We stopped the presses to change the photo and threw out thousands of papers still sitting at our dock.”

Reportedly, Washburn has been fielding complaints from readers who received the paper for the past two days.

The page in question was laid out by a “design hub” in Louisville, which is part of a push by The Gannett Co., The Enquirer’s owner, to centralize some functions like many copy-editing duties into regional locations.

The same design hub was responsible for a similar incident in December when a Gannett paper in South Carolina, The Greenville News, published an article with the word “fuck” randomly inserted into it. The gaffe caught the attention of several websites including The Huffington Post and Romenesko.com.

Sunday’s incident occurred just two days after four veteran copy editors at The Enquirer left after taking an “early retirement” severance deal to reduce the newspaper’s expenses.

Here is the full text of Washburn’s email:

Sent: Mon 4/16/2012 4:10 PM

From: Carolyn Washburn

To: Cin-News Users

Cc:

Subject: in case you are getting calls about a photo in Sunday's paper

A photo ran on the state government page of a protestor holding up a sign that used the word f#*&. It was caught on the press and replated but it still went out to several thousand homes.

Here is how I am responding.

Yes, the photo was completely inappropriate, on many levels.

I learned about this after midnight Saturday when someone in our operation saw this photo and alerted us. We stopped the presses to change the photo and threw out thousands of papers still sitting at our dock. Unfortunately a few thousand papers had already gone out to carriers.

I deeply apologize and am working this morning to understand why this photo was chosen in the first place and why it was not caught sooner. I take this very seriously.

Rich Hoffman loses control over the NoLakota website he created

Local angry guy Rich
Hoffman should have stuck closer to the Glen Beck style that made
Butler County Tea Partiers like him — too much Rush Limbaugh got
the bull whip performer ousted today by the local organization he
helped start.

The Enquirer reported
this week that Hoffman recently ranted on his blog about a vague
group of pro-school tax women in the district, calling them
prostitutes and describing how their husbands “roll them over at
night and insert their manhood” before leaving hundred dollar bills
in their purses, and then defended the remarks when contacted by
The Enquirer.

The Enquirer’s
early report (updated once Hoffman got the axe) included the
following:

The head of the
anti-school tax group NoLakota wrote on his internet blog site that
Lakota school mothers are “just prostitutes to their husbands who
do everything they can to be away from them aside from the occasional
sex.”

“Their husband’s
(sic) roll them over at night and insert their manhood into these
women of the bedroom and hundred-dollar bills find their way into
their purses. The women don’t know what the man does to earn the
money, nor do they care. They are busy saving the world one child at
a time with howls of safety and more regulations as they rush to the
polling places at election time,” wrote Hoffman, who is also a
bullwhip performer and periodic guest on local radio talk shows
regarding Lakota funding issues.

A photo of Hoffman
wearing a cowboy hat and holding a whip had been presented on the
homepage of The Enquirer for most of Thursday, when NoLakota
Treasurer Dan Varney told the newspaper that Hoffman had been banned
from further association with the group. Varney said the group’s
decision wasn’t in response to the publicity of The Enquirer’s
report.

Hoffman’s writings
also include a reference to “crazy PTA moms and their minions of
latte drinking despots with diamond rings the size of car tires and
asses to match, (they) plot against me with an anger only estrogen
can produce,” The Enquirer reported.

NoLakota says it has
removed all references to Hoffman’s personal website, called "Overmanwarrior's Wisdom," (overmanwarrior.wordpress.com), where he writes lengthy
diatribes against public school funding, teachers and political
opponents and in one post compared the pressure he was under to that
which Rush Limbaugh faced after calling a Georgetown University
student a prostitute and a slut.

Hoffman wrote:

The progressive mode
of attack they use to protect their positions which cannot withstand
scrutiny is to attack people like Rush Limbaugh whenever he says
something they believe they can use against him in an emotional
argument. Conservatives typically are terrible at playing this game
with progressives because they tend to operate on a belief system
rooted in the truth. So they can easily be attacked because if they
cross the line, they feel bad about it, and that guilt is used
against them to change their behavior in the future.

Hoffman’s blog also
includes numerous clips from the Glenn Beck TV show, a lengthy story about film production inspired by Peter
Jackson’s The Hobbit and more several Star Wars clips.

Hoffman as of Thursday
afternoon hadn’t responded to a request from The Enquirer
seeking comment, and CityBeat never tried to contact him out
of fear of him thinking we were treading on him.

The following is an
eight-minute video published on the Overmanwarrior site titled
“A Whip Stunt to Save America,” wherein Hoffman uses his patio
table as a metaphorical Constitution, a bowl of water as American
civilization sitting on top of a cup (everything we put our tax money
into) and then whips the cup out from underneath without spilling
civilization all over the Constitution and then says, “I don’t
really understand the progressive way of thinking — they don’t
really belong in this country in my opinion.”

Governor’s real persona is more offensive than his political one

Ohio Gov. John Kasich yesterday delivered his second “State of the State” speech, a reportedly hilarious mockery of political tradition that ranged from harmlessly wacky to straight-up sexist, while making a pit stop in the “Parkinson’s disease is funny” category.

Kasich’s apparent intention was to announce a new broadband plan, introduce an award honoring courageous Ohioans and try to say that his plans for shale drilling in the Northeastern part of the state are totally going to respect the environment.

Those familiar with Kasich’s governing style will find these descriptions to be only slightly surprising. Remember last January when he called a police officer an “idiot” in a speech for giving him a speeding ticket? Or when he mocked Ohio’s drivers license for being pink (PINK IS SO GAY!)? Or that time he told a group of business owners that he wanted to make Ohio cool because the executives at LexisNexis said all their employees would rather live on the coasts instead of sucky-ass Ohio?

Sharp-eyed readers who received an email update this week from Cincinnati City Councilman P.G. Sittenfeld got a surprise: At the bottom, it stated the missive came from the “Office of Congressman P.G. Sittenfeld.”

That prompted some observers to wonder if the error was a Freudian slip and whether Sittenfeld, who was just sworn into his first council term three weeks ago, had already set his sights on higher office.